about the author… Edward Ashton is a clinical research scientist and writer living in Rochester, New York. His short fiction has appeared in dozens of venues both in print and online, ranging from Louisiana Literature to Daily Science Fiction. Three Days in April is his first novel.

narrator Josh Roseman

about the narrator… Josh Roseman (not the trombonist; the other one) lives in Georgia and makes internets for a living. He has been published in — among others — Asimov’s, Escape Pod, and Evil Girlfriend Media, and has work forthcoming (or already released) in 2016 from Abstract Jam, Stupefying Stories, and The Overcast. In 2015, he released his first collection, The Clockwork Russian and Other Stories. When not writing, he mostly complains that he’s not writing.

Bluejay
By Edward Ashton

Micah steps from the shuttle and onto the tarmac, eyes slitted against the hard north wind that whips across the empty runway. The sky is a flat, leaden gray, with high thin clouds too light for snow, but too thick to let the sun come through as anything more than a vague, diffuse glow near the southern horizon. Micah hunches his shoulders against the bitter cold, ducks his chin to his chest, and pulls his coat tight around him. He hesitates, glances up at the desolate stand of dead trees at the far end of the runway, then walks slowly toward the terminal building.

A sense of uneasiness, which has lurked deep in his belly since he boarded the shuttle, grows steadily as it becomes increasingly clear that he’s alone here. He hadn’t expected an honor guard, but he’d expected… something. As he reaches the terminal entrance, he looks back to see the shuttle wheel around and accelerate back down the runway. He pauses with his hand on the door. He can see through the glass that a half-dozen bodies are sprawled on the floor inside, perfectly preserved. He takes a deep breath in, then lets it out slowly as he enters the building. The scream of the shuttle’s engines fades as the door swings shut behind him.

As he climbs the frozen escalator to the arrivals lounge, Micah remembers the last time he passed through this airport. It was years ago, and he’d been on his way to visit a distant cousin in the North Country. He remembers stopping for a drink before heading to the rental car counter, intending to stay only long enough to take the edge off before a four hour drive, but instead spending most of the afternoon drinking crappy domestic beer and trading double entendres with the bartender. She was tall and lean and blonde, not young, but not yet old either, and her smile caught and held him long after he should have been on the road.

She’s dead now, of course. Lake Ontario was the epicenter. When the strike came, it was twelve thousand miles in any direction from here to safety.

The human came to She Shalu on the Day of Flowering Awareness. Damo met him near the Still Garden, the fumes of the exiting shuttle mixing with the sharp spice of the tall, white twizak plant. Damo wore a humanoid shape so as to minimize the stranger’s discomfort.

Damo studied the human with the practiced eyes of a Synan. Dark hair covered his head and parts of his body, and he was sleight of build, despite the solidity of his form. About 1.7 meters tall. His features were mostly smooth, bones prominent, eyes with the barest hint of a slant. A mouth surrounded by full lips.

“How may I help you?” Damo said, trying to sound gracious.

“I came to study Wan She,” the human said.

Damo felt his features flow with his astonishment. Perhaps he had not heard correctly, or his translation module was malfunctioning. “I am sorry,” he said. “Wan She is the Path of Flowing Shapes. It is a Synan practice. Humans, being incapable of shifting, cannot practice it.”

The human smiled, revealing straight, white teeth. “I know. I’m writing a book,” he said. “But isn’t it true that the first stage is concerned solely with contemplation? Surely that is not beyond a human.”

Damo stifled his urge to shift in response to his unease. Uncontrolled shifting was against the teachings of Wan She. “That is true,” he said. “But Wan She is a path. Not a series of distinct teachings. To step on that path is to begin a journey.”

“All I ask is that you let me speak to your Tanshe. Let him decide.”

Damo was all too willing to accommodate the human in this. Let the Tanshe decide. It certainly saved Damo the trouble of having to assimilate this odd request.

“Please follow me,” he said.

He led the human through the Still Garden, inhaling the heady scent of it, delighting in its exoticness. Most of the students overlooked the Still Garden, and in doing so missed out on one of the true beauties of She Shalu.

They moved through the pearlescent designs of the sanctuary’s hallways to the Tanshe’s bubbled door. “Wait here,” Damo said, then entered.

The Tanshe was in an original form, multilimbed, eyeless, lacking both ears and nose. Turning inward. Her bright amber skin was splattered with black inky spots. She looked up as Damo entered, eyes appearing from inside her face. Damo let his features droop in the customary manner. “Tanshe, there is a human to see you.”

The Tanshe’s features flowed and shifted until they were almost exactly a human’s. “Send it in,” she said. “And wait outside.”

Damo’s skin settled. He was not to be involved in this discussion. It was good. The Tanshe would deal with it and send the human away. Damo did as the Tanshe asked.

He waited outside, letting his features relax into the default Synan shape. He’d worn the humanoid one as a courtesy, and because it was polite and expected, but he disliked it. It was distasteful. Too firm. Too set.

He waited for some time, then the door bubble opened. He quickly shifted back into his humanoid form and turned to face the human, now exiting. “She told me to send you in,” the human said.

“Don’t be stupid,” he snaps. “Phil would kill me if I didn’t come with you.”

Barry is fiftyish, portly and gray-haired. Seeing him take off his shirt is an experience I wish I’d never had.

“I have friends with certifications,” I say. “It’s not like I couldn’t have asked one of them.”

“How many of them have actually been down there?” It’s almost a growl, and I’m actually cowed a little. “That’s what I thought.”

I sit on the hard bench, wood planks covered in thin, all-weather carpet, and fiddle with my regulator.

“How far away do you think we are?” he asks.

“Don’t know. Ask the captain.”

Barry looks up at the bridge, where Al — the captain — stands, driving the boat. Al is even older than Barry, narrow and hard and tanned almost leathery with decades of exposure to the sun. Instead of going up to talk to him, though, Barry goes around the cabin to stand by the bow, leaving me bouncing up and down on the bench as the boat zips across the water. The light chop makes the horizon rise and fall faster than is comfortable. I can take it, though, and if I get sick enough to throw up, at least I know enough to do it over the side.

My guess is that we’re ten minutes from the dive site. Maybe fifteen.

After waiting seven years to get my answers, fifteen minutes isn’t much of a wait at all.

Marla slapped her prehensile tail onto the table, cracking its surface with her paralysing stinger and rattling the chess pieces. The blow echoed through the control room.

“I hate it when you do that, Steven.”

“Do what?”

“Think you can read me.”

I smiled. “Your underarm scales are pale, which means a supercharged diet or zero-gravity. As we haven’t been off-planet, it must be the
food. Plus, your breath stinks of sulphur and your claws have white rings.”

Marla pointed one crimson eye at the table, but kept the other on me.

“Your move,” she said.

“Give me time. Why do you think I’m restless?”

“Because you’ve spent the last three weeks researching Loris, and done each patrol fully armed.”

I glanced through the window, as if by chance I might catch our thief creeping up in plain view, but all I saw were two huge moons glowering over the ruined planet, its civilisation long-dead, part-excavated and full of secrets.

I couldn’t let Marla know the site had me spooked, though. Her people had been hunters for a thousand years, and, through a quirk of fate, she believed in me.

“Right.” I said. “Let’s patrol.” I got most of the way to the door before I realised what the click behind me had meant. “And you can put that piece back.”

“Damn,” Marla said.

The night was darker than usual, but I left off my flashlight and navigated by the excavation’s amber glow. After two months I’d learned
the drill pretty well: walk three steps from the door before turning right, drop down through the first causeway, crunch my way over rubble and calcified ferns, pass beside three thousand year old shop windows, then into what people said were the temples of the spider-creatures that had once ruled Artemis.

As I walked, Marla leapt from one wall to another like a shooting star. She looked beautiful, her scales shining like jewels.

“Why you care so much about an urban legend?” she asked.

“Because he’s a mystery. For two hundred years, Loris has been stealing artifacts, leaving only the letter L engraved onto the wall. Who wouldn’t be interested?”

“He’s only human, Steven.”

“I’m not sure. We didn’t have the technology to grow new bodies two centuries ago, so if he’s human, how has he lived so long?”

Marla was silent for a while, then she said, “however good he is, I bet you’re better.”

I walked away, unhappy with false praise. Instead, I ducked through the first arch, and stepped out below the huge, half-buried alien
machine. Next to it, the laboratories and excavating machines looked forlorn and tiny. Forty archaeologists worked here in Artemis’ summer, but none had yet figured out what the machine did.

She appeared at my shoulder, scuttled up to the machine and crouched, eyes twitching in different directions. What had previously been a
mountain of dark metal now held a tiny panel that shimmered like oil on water. As we watched, it faded to black.

“Intriguing,” Marla said.

“Still think Loris is a myth?”

“I think we need to be careful.”

She left in a blur, dancing up the wall. I crept after her, gun ready, but stopped at the end of the avenue, just as the city opened into a plaza capped by a broken tower.

“What’s up?” Marla asked.

I sent my mind back through memories of other patrols, and compared them to the present. Some people have a photographic memory; I have video recall. It’s rare, but it has saved my life more than once.

“The shadows are wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

I ran through the images again, spotting a nearby lamp that had been smashed to put an area several metres square into darkness. Something was lying there, dark and still in the shadows, covered in thick cloth. Even as I dragged it into the light, I knew it was a body: an old man, sallow and grey, with slash marks down his face and a stab wound in his chest. His blood had not yet congealed.

“Loris is here,” I said.

Marla appeared at my shoulder. “So who’s that?”

“An accomplice, maybe?”

Her eyes swiveled upwards. “Steven?”

“What?”

“The lights are going out.”

I stood. Segment by segment, darkness was falling over the excavations.

“He must be in the base,” I said.

“About time we found something to hunt.”

Marla’s thoughts murmured low, then turned into alien chanting as she skipped ahead along the darkening walls. I chased after her, the sound of her death song filling my mind. It scared me when she was like this. She was too eager, too ready to put herself at risk.

When we reached the base I saw that the door had been forced, revealing two entrance corridors in a Y, their lights off.

“I’ll go right,” Marla said, her voice full of excitement.

“What if he’s in my side?”

She laughed. “Then keep some for me.”

She shivered and curled her tail like a scorpion, before speeding into the darkness. I gripped my weapon and followed.

“Corridor one clear,” Marla said while I was only part-way down my own, my footsteps clanging along the metal floor despite my efforts to be silent. Every step threw moon-shadows crazing over the walls. When I reached the end, the connecting door opened itself.

“Why remove lights but not the power?”

“Beats me. Reception room one clear, by the way.”

My heart beat hard as I stepped into an echoing dome of titanium and plastic, turned on my light and scanned the walls. Our base was a
hundred years old and built for far more spartan times. Now it echoed hollowly and something scraped in the distance.

“Sickbay clear,” Marla said, though she seemed to be hurrying too much. Despite her confidence, I’d seen her get hurt before. Then I noticed something else.

“The floor’s vibrating,” I said, moving to the wall and activating the readout.

“What with?”

“The reactor’s been set to self-destruct.”

Disbelief filled her voice. “How is that even possible? What about fail-safes?”

“It was designed to stop other races getting our technology.”

“You mean it’s deliberate? What sort of idiot culture builds a bomb into a science base?”

“Who cares? Right now I have to shut it off.”

“You know, if we hadn’t melded, I’d still be hunting on Targol.”

“You nearly died on Targol.”

“Everybody dies, Steven. The aim is to make it glorious. There’s nothing glorious about a bomb.”

“There’s nothing glorious about being stupid, either. Please be careful.”

Gun held high, I slid into the reactor room with my back to the wall.

I didn’t think there was anything wonderful about dying in any manner.

That was why I’d joined the Explorer’s Service a hundred years earlier, to get the new bodies they’d offered. Old, young, male, female — I’d tried them all. Little had I known I’d end up having humanity’s first contact with the Lizards.

I swept my flashlight from left to right, trying to be systematic.

Given the number of alcoves and chest-high machines, the room could have been full of people and I wouldn’t have known. The reactor terminal stood exposed in the centre, but it was the only way to stop the countdown. Or to start it, I realised, which meant the intruder was probably in my side of the building.

I kept low, and began to relax only when I reached the terminal and managed to end the countdown. Then something skittered along the floor behind me. I tried to turn, but was far too late.

Ten years earlier I’d been late, too. I was still in the Service because of my rapport with the Lizards, and had been partnered with one on her first hunt. It was sold as a getting-to-know-you mission, but tradition said it should be done without technology. After showing lizard after lizard my fingernails, they’d finally allowed me one small knife.

Targol was hot that month, entering the nearest phase of its eccentric orbit, and after being in the jungle for three days I was glad I’d been argued down over body armour. Then my companion found the first traces of our prey and her naive eagerness took over. She sped after it, leaving me alone amongst the thin green trees and ankle-deep water, naked except for a knife pouch.

When the screaming began, I panicked and fled, only to find myself in the heart of the action regardless.

Someone was screaming when I woke this time, too, face-down on a cracked floor-tile in the flickering darkness of the reactor room. My head ached, pain between my shoulder blades prevented me breathing fully, and my throat burned with vomit. I heard a skittering noise, then more screaming.

I rolled over and saw it. Facing the wall, dark red scales shining, and eight legs skittering over the reactor room floor was a creature I’d only previously seen in drawings on the alien machine.

Although its front two legs looked adapted to tool-use and it carried a green bracelet high on one of them, it drew breath instead, and used some internal force to blow a stream of fine grit onto the wall, completing the letter L it had been etching.

Two thoughts filled my brain: first, that this couldn’t be the same Loris who had left footprints on Beta-4. Second: was Marla okay?

She arrived in a blur, skipping off two walls and landing on the creature’s back before plunging her stinger into its chitinous armour. Incredibly, she failed to penetrate, and instead the creature turned, grabbed and hurled her with such force that she snapped against the far wall and left a dint in the metal. She fell and did not get up.

The creature advanced, raising one of its second-row legs, tipped with barbs, for a killing blow.

“No,” I shouted, grabbing a back leg — and immediately it turned and skittered towards me like an onrushing asteroid. Now I understood why the arches round the dig had been so broad. The spider was as high as my shoulder, but wider than three humans.

I kicked backwards along the floor, waving my hands to show I had no hostile intent.

“There’s no need for violence. Take what you want.”

It stopped, and its mouth clicked sideways before speaking. “I’m sorry, but I can’t let you tell anyone about me.” As the sentence progressed, I made out an Earth accent and realised how Loris had lived so long. Nowadays we use enormous hospital ships around the moons of Jupiter, but there’s really no reason an alien couldn’t make the technology smaller. A bracelet, for example.

“Was it the machine we’ve been excavating?” I asked, walking closer.

“Yes,” Loris said. “Damn gene-banks. I turned it on thinking it was a technology store, but ended up bringing one of them to life, instead.”

“You thought quickly, body-swapping like that.”

“I am rather proud of myself, but, if you’ll excuse me, I have to destroy the witnesses.”

I ducked, and he caught me high on one shoulder, my arm splintering in a flash of blood and pain that took me back to that fateful day in the jungle years earlier. This time I remained conscious, and as he lifted my impaled body off the floor, I groped for the alien bracelet, flipped back the cover and hit its only button.

I expected to wake looking at my own body through spider-eyes. I was even going to be gentle with Loris, take him into custody and confiscate the bracelet.

None of that happened.

Instead, I ended on my back, staring at the ceiling with my left side aching. When I tried to stand, I found it difficult because I now had legs where arms should have been. Also, I was seeing images in two places at once. Crazy, confused images, that —

— I focused both eyes to the front. Ahead, the alien spider threw my limp body at a wall before turning to face me. I was a half-metre off the floor, dark-green, and, something told me, possessed of a strong prehensile tail with a stinger at its end. Even if I lived, I had no idea if Marla would, as she was now trapped in my dying body. To save her, I would have to press the bracelet again, but it was still on the spider.

The spider charged, so I leapt for the wall like I’d seen Marla do. Pads miraculously flowered upon my fingers as I ran over the surface just ahead of its onrushing blows. They cracked nearer and nearer, so I leapt to the ceiling, re-oriented my eyes, and ran over its bellowing body.

The door yawned in front of me as I realised I was faster than it was. I could leave, and live to fight another day. The Service medics would raise an eyebrow but give me another body eventually.

That wouldn’t save Marla, though. Reluctantly, tiny heart beating faster than I could believe, I turned back to face the thing. Behind it, I saw my body get up, try to follow, then fall over and throw up.

A scream that sounded terribly like Marla hit the air and my mind simultaneously.

“I’m sorry,” I thought back to her. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

The spider didn’t seem to notice as it attacked me at full speed, legs whipping and jaw wide. I spun off the door jamb, backflipped from the ceiling and scuttled down the corridor as the whisper of its barbs skimmed me. This body was amazing. Now I knew how Marla’s people hunted so well, I didn’t feel so bad about being poor in comparison.

“Come on,” I shouted. “I can take you,” but the noise came out as a series of clicks. Whatever magic Marla used to speak mind to mind remained a mystery. Ahead, my body rose, then collapsed.

“Steven,” Marla’s thoughts echoed. “If this is pain, make it stop.”

Ten years earlier I’d turned the corner and ran headlong into a ghoul-like creature holding Marla down and throttling her. More by luck than judgement I’d plunged in my blade and saved her life. Though its dying blows had mortally shattered my ribcage, I’d won the fight and upheld the honour of humanity.

Now in this body, I knew I’d failed Marla when it mattered most, and anger drove me forwards. I felt exhilarated, too, and wanted only to leap for its face and take it on directly. Even if I died, this creature would pay for hurting her. As I feinted left, a barbed leg whipped past the spot I would have stood upon, but it was so hard emotionally to give ground.

It’s endorphins, I thought, suddenly realising just how much this body was pumped up for battle. No wonder Marla was so active, if she went through this each time we hunted.

Though it felt wrong, I forced myself to retreat, skipping from wall to wall and trying to think like a human — and as I dodged, I ran through the fight in my mind, searching for a weakness.

At last I remembered a spot between its plates that had opened up when it struck my human form. I turned, waited, and ducked down as the spider’s leg whistled over my back, ending up underneath the thing. I twisted my eyes frantically, feeling nauseous from the spinning images, but finally found the gap — struck hard, and, in the biggest surprise of the day, had something like an orgasm as poison pumped out of my stinger.

A minute later, and still quivering with excitement, I struggled out from Loris’ still form, retrieved the transfer bracelet and went looking for Marla.

She lay in a pool of blood, and my heart trembled to see her spirit inside my dying eyes. Something white fell from her mouth; a tooth, perhaps.

“I never realised it was like this, being you,” she said, in part mind-speak, part whisper.

As I held up the transfer bracelet, I finally realised something I’d refused to notice in the five years since she’d saved my life on Targol: whatever strange, wayward, naive spirit inhabited her, it was one I loved. Although I was going to die, I felt happy, knowing I could swap back and save her.

I pressed the switch. At first the pain was immense, but then, through some unexpected grace, I fell into utter blackness. When I woke I was completely numb and unable to move. I opened my eyes to find eight images of Marla dancing before me, all smiling in that slow lizard way of hers.

“What happened?” I asked, finding words so hard to form I ended up just thinking them.

“I saved your life, as you would have done, had you thought it through.”

My mind flicked back to that day in the jungle when a young lizard had made the decision to save my life by sharing her own life-force the only way she could, leaving us exquisitely and uniquely connected.

“By melding with me again?”

“We can only perform the mating ritual once, I’m afraid.”

“Then what?”

She raised her tail and showed me the stinger. “This isn’t lethal poison.”

I looked down and saw my new body, already feeling the numbness recede. Eight jointed spider legs ran from the edge of my vision to the floor. Lost in wonder, I raised a long barbed leg and stared. “Loris?” I asked at last.

She looked away. “I put him in your body, Steven. I’m sorry I couldn’t make his death glorious.”

I extended one leg, then another; skittered sideways before levelling myself.

Marla spoke again. “Steven. When I was dying, you had certain … thoughts about me.”

“I’m sorry. I —”

Her skin paled in a ripple from her nose to the tip of her tail. “—I’d just like to say that it’s about time.”

I stared at her for a long time, then found myself saying, “I know.” Later, as we walked down the long corridor to the outside world together, the Spider and the Lizard, I was already wondering what to tell the Service about how I ended up in my current shape. And I had no idea at all what they were going to make of my next request for a body.–>

That was a joke, of course. Light can be slowed to a standstill in a photon trap, travel on going nowhere at all forever in the blueing distance of an event horizon, or blaze through hard vacuum as fast as information itself moves through the universe. Time is relentless, the tide which measures the perturbations of the cosmos. The 160.2 GHz hum of creation counts the measure of our lives as surely as any heartbeat.

There is no t in e=mc2.

I’d argued with her then, missing her point back when understanding her might have mattered. Now, well, nothing much at all mattered. Time has caught up with us all. (Continue Reading…)

I sit beneath the dark green sky, overlooking the valley that has changed much over the years. What was once a stream has swelled into a river while, to the east, lush vegetation grows where I think there was once a shallow lake. I can’t remember definitely. The information is stored inside me, filed, itemized; I’m merely unsure how to access it. It will come to me. Later, when a random search, an unrelated thought, cracks open the proper conduits and a pulse of electricity resurrects the knowledge, unbidden.

Until then, I am content to wait.

Below my knee, the dented brass-coloured metal becomes the red of a tree trunk, substituting as a shin and foot. Like an antiquated peg-leg, like a stereotypical pira…pi…pi-

Pi is 3.1415926…

The organic substance must be replaced occasionally, but the concept has served satisfactorily for almost two hundred years. It was easy to jury-rig. Not so my mnemonic core. I lack the appropriate tools and diagnostic programs.

Yes. There had been a lake, teeming with the hoorah-thet fish.

I call them fish simply to provide a basis of comparative orientation. Fish only exist on earth, and this is not earth. Earth is a long, long way away.(Continue Reading…)

Three days before the race, when Delroy had finished warming down from a
training run, his coach summoned him for a talk. Delroy could tell it was
something big. Michito’s job — assisted by his Enhanced empathy — was to
become exquisitely sensitive to his athlete’s mood, so as to help get the
best out of him. The attunement sometimes became mutual, and Delroy now
discerned a rare eagerness in Michito’s almost-natural face.

“Behind you all the way.” Michito grinned in delight. “It’s the final star
in the constellation. You’re in great shape, the weather will be ideal,
we’re two thousand metres above sea level” — Michito made a sweeping
gesture, encompassing the many other factors affecting performance — “and
it all adds up to one thing.”

“I’m going to win?” Delroy didn’t understand Michito’s glee: the weather
would be the same for all the runners. (Continue Reading…)

Her words sting, but at least she’s paying attention to me. I’ll take what I can get from the woman I love. “I’m sorry, Dr. M. Please let me try again.”

“Everything is ruined.” With one arm, Dr. Medici sweeps notebooks and glass beakers from the table in front of her. “Now I’ll never finish the doomsday weapon today!”

As Dr. Medici throws her head down onto her folded arms on the table, I cross the lab and pick up the silver tray that she threw. I see myself reflected in its surface–thick glasses, big nose, bald head, pure geek…not her type. “I thought you liked the crinkle-cut ones,” I say as I pluck chicken fingers and french fries from the floor and drop them onto the tray.

“Steak fries,” says Dr. Medici without raising her head. “How many times do I have to tell you, Glue?”